South Korean technology firm Samsung Electronics announced Thursday that it has begun mass production of a new flash memory chip for smartphones, offering greater speed and capacity than those currently available on the market.
 
 The new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) would be the industry's first 128GB chip, though other versions with storage capacities of 32GB and 64GB would also be available, Samsung said in a statement from its headquarters in Seoul.
 
 It also said that its new UFS would be faster and consume less energy than current ones, and would provide more stable conditions for viewing Ultra High Definition videos in smartphones.
 
 The new chip will be thinner and can be inserted in the ePOP embedded memory package module in Samsung gadgets, allowing the company to make slimmer smartphones and increase the size of its battery, according to the statement.
 
 The 'Command Queue' feature of the UFS would accelerate the speed of command execution by up to 2.7 times compared to the current high range products using eMMC 5.0 MultiMedia Card.
 
 In this regard, Samsung also said that it had begun mass production of the next eMMC 5.1, which would be 50 percent faster than the eMMC 5.0, according to the statement.